This strategy was used with Group A for suffixes and common EOG words. The students were given an index card with the word on it and were told to act out the word to their classmates. There was no talking involved or drawing; they had to act it out.
We chose seven of the most common suffixes and created words using those suffixes. The students were given an index card that used the suffix or a card that had the main word without the suffix (example: use, useless). The students played charades with both words to show how the word changes when a suffix is added to it. After playing charades, we looked at the list of the words and students talked about common traits and if they noticed any patterns. This was when they noticed the words that had suffixes added to them. Some students even went back and acted the words out again to see how the word changed.
The EOG words that were chosen were words that we found to be in many questions on the EOG.
Our thoughts: Even though this strategy was well received by the students and entertaining to watch we ran into a few problems. Students had a difficult time sticking to the rule of only acting out words, they wanted to draw the word instead. Some students did not have enough knowledge of the words to be able to think of a way to act it out. This strategy might be better used once the definitions are taught. The guesses made were also very wide range, maybe if we had given the students a category that the words came under we would have had more productive guesses. We planned for this strategy to be a ten minute warm-up and ended up to take a majority of the class time.
Student thoughts....
“I liked figuring out the relationship of words.”
“I think it really helped us interact with the words.”
